DOWN AND OUT: From dumpster diving on "Downsized" to unemployment on"Fairy Job Mother", reality TV shows the effects of the poor econmy.Rahoul Ghose

“Fairy Job Mother” (
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When the Great Depression hit, Hollywood responded with movies like “Top Hat” and “The Gay Divorcee” — Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers as wealthy ditzes with upper-crust accents who danced, cavorted and fell in and out of love in expensive evening clothes.

The movies of the Great Depression became a great escape for anyone with a dime to plop down.

Now, we are in the current Almost-As-Great Depression, and TV has responded — finally — with a hapless trickle of shows like “The Apprentice” (The Unemployed Edition) and “Outsourced” (a comedy about it maybe not being such a bad thing that some jobs are going overseas).

This week, it looks like the trickle may turn into a flood.

Next wave: No-escape reality.

Tonight, the horror of the job crisis comes home with “The Fairy Job Mother,” a show starring an unlikely Brit named Haley Taylor, the “Supernanny” of the chronically unemployed.

Taylor may be the worst-dressed human on TV but, nonetheless, gives 100 percent solid advice to the jobless about dressing, appearance, speaking, interviewing and becoming relentlessly ambitious about finding work.

Next week, WE gets into the unemployment line with “Downsized,” a documentary reality series that follows Laura and Todd Bruce of Arizona, who together have seven kids in their blended family. They’ve gone from upper-middle class to poverty since they married a few years ago.

Back then, when Arizona was ranked No. 2 in new building starts, Todd was pulling in $200,000 as a general contractor. Then the bottom fell out.

Todd lost his business, the house and just about everything else.

The family of nine now lives on Laura’s $39,000 teacher’s salary, supplemented by food stamps. It’s gotten so bad that the kids are dumpster diving and collecting bottles from the trash to help make the rent.

The show follows this family to the verge of homelessness as they re-invent what it means to be a family.

Meanwhile, on “Fairy Job Mother,” Taylor deals with Shawn and Michelle Aughe, who have been unemployed for five years, have two toddlers and live on welfare. Taylor forces them to get off their butts and clean their apartment littered with dog poop.

Then she forces them to volunteer to do a job — in this case, shoveling cow poop on a farm (what an irony!) — with the hope they get offered a paying job eventually.

How do people get into this situation? The economic depression, it turns out, literally causes clinical depression.

Every idiot politico in DC should be tied down and forced to watch the new reality TV — it’s actually real.